A Geometric Perspective on Stabilizing Value Conflict Resolution

Saket Reddy and Andy Liu's paper "A Geometric Perspective on Stabilizing Value Conflict Resolution," published in the Proceedings of AACL-IJCNLP 2026 (pages 5761–5785), reports that chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning correlates with further smoothing a large language model's loss landscape in its sharpest direction, addressing the optimization instability of traditional scalar rewards in value-conflict scenarios. The authors present a new value conflict-focused CoT design that correlates with additional smoothing of the sharpest direction and further increases moral reasoning performance on downstream benchmarks, which they frame as a promising avenue for advancing pluralistic alignment in LLMs.

Abstract Large Language Models LLMs often struggle to navigate user requests that contain complex value conflicts, as direct scalar rewards are often ill-equipped to handle these scenarios. To address this challenge, we investigate how chain-of-thought CoT reasoning can help improve performance in this domain. Geometrically, we show that CoT correlates with further smoothing the model’s loss landscape in its sharpest direction, helping resolve the optimization instability of traditional scalar rewards. In terms of performance, we demonstrate via relevant downstream benchmarks that CoT may increase capability, demonstrating that value conflict-focused CoT has the potential to be an effective mechanism for better moral reasoning. To capitalize on this potential, we create a new value conflict-focused CoT design that correlates with further smoothing the sharpest direction of the loss landscape and further increases moral reasoning performance. This finding shows that explicitly modifying and improving the design of reasoning dynamics offers a promising avenue for advancing pluralistic alignment in LLMs. - Anthology ID: - 2026.aacl-long.260 - Volume: - Proceedings of the 15th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing and the 5th Conference of the Asia-Pacific Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics Volume 1: Long Papers https://aclanthology.org/volumes/2026.aacl-long/ - Month: - November - Year: - 2026 - Address: - Hengqin, China - Editors: - Yue Zhang https://aclanthology.org/people/yue-zhang/unverified/ , Ruifeng Xu https://aclanthology.org/people/ruifeng-xu/ , Ayu Purwarianti https://aclanthology.org/people/ayu-purwarianti/ , Tong Rong https://aclanthology.org/people/tong-rong/unverified/ , Jun Suzuki https://aclanthology.org/people/jun-suzuki/ - Venues: - AACL https://aclanthology.org/venues/aacl/ | IJCNLP https://aclanthology.org/venues/ijcnlp/ - SIG: - Publisher: - Association for Computational Linguistics - Note: - Pages: - 5761–5785 - Language: - URL: - https://aclanthology.org/2026.aacl-long.260/ https://aclanthology.org/2026.aacl-long.260/ - DOI: - Cite ACL : - Saket Reddy and Andy Liu. 2026. A Geometric Perspective on Stabilizing Value Conflict Resolution https://aclanthology.org/2026.aacl-long.260/ . In Proceedings of the 15th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing and the 5th Conference of the Asia-Pacific Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics Volume 1: Long Papers , pages 5761–5785, Hengqin, China. Association for Computational Linguistics. - Cite Informal : - A Geometric Perspective on Stabilizing Value Conflict Resolution https://aclanthology.org/2026.aacl-long.260/ Reddy & Liu, AACL-IJCNLP 2026 - PDF: - https://aclanthology.org/2026.aacl-long.260.pdf https://aclanthology.org/2026.aacl-long.260.pdf